As neighbouring countries, Turkey and Greece share an extensive past. Their historical ties date back to the fourteenth century and to the Ottoman Empire's conquest of Constantinople in 1453. However, the beginning of their contemporary relationship can be traced back to the early nineteenth century, when Greece became a sovereign and independent state as result of its struggle against the Ottoman Empire. This historical background between the two nations has always shaped the priorities on both countries’ foreign and security policy agendas.

Historically, one may identify the Turkish–Greek relationship as a vicious cycle of improvement and deterioration. Both nations view each other as a ‘source of threat’ or as ‘enemy’, a mutual perception that mainly stems from the historical context. Although the problems between them have generally been interpreted through the lenses of security, politics and, to some extent, economics, it would be naive to over-estimate the burden of the past – the main source of feelings of enmity and mistrust. History, thus, has conceivably played a significant role in shaping not only their foreign policies but also their national identities. Historical legacies and feelings of mutual antipathy between Turkey and Greece have also influenced their bilateral relationship and the mindsets of decision-makers ever since the two nation-states were founded. As such, an understanding of the nature and present state of the Turkish–Greek relationship would be incomplete without its historical context. As Gurel (1993a, 10) has pointed out, for both Greece and Turkey, ‘[h]istory is not past, [since] the past continues to live in the present’.

Likewise, Clogg (1980, 141), noting the impact of historical heritage on national identity and historical consciousness, has written:

Families occupy nuanced and sometimes vexed places in modernist literature, as its subjects and as historical structures shaping its creation. In work across the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, modernist authors frequently depict multigenerational family units as sites of recognition, tension, exchange and transformation. Relationality develops via birth, adoption, marriage, divorce and death, along with intimate bonds not codified by blood or law, all of which usher individuals in and out of the life of each group. While generations extend in multiple directions, their complex genealogies are inseparable from the larger culture they inhabit together and represented in the art of the time.

This chapter explores the influence of multigenerational family in the networks of feminist, lesbian modernism. It argues that historical families developed by marriage and birth also supported queer members and relationships, visibly and tenaciously, and such families were vital to the work of wider cultural collectives and institutions. Attending specifically to the feminist, lesbian writing and life of Eva Gore-Booth (1870–1926) within her immediate and more expansive creative network that includes two generations of her family and her partner Esther Roper, it aims to advance what we know of intertextual and social relations in modernism. With an examination of Gore-Booth's suffrage and labour activism, poems ‘Women's Rights’ and ‘Women's Trades on the Embankment’ (1907), along with her foundational contributions to the queer periodical Urania (1916–26), I argue that her life's work indicates how historical family units were not simply at odds with the social and intellectual experiments of the modernist project. Instead, some became flexible spaces for the development of feminist and lesbian lives and writing, and are crucial to our understanding of the social forces that animated modernism.

Gore-Booth lived and wrote among her contemporaries’ diverse perspectives on and experiences with kinship structures that indicate how queer relationality can be, as Tyler Bradway argues about kinship in contemporary writing, ‘not so much the family one chooses as a family that accumulates over time. Its diagram is dynamic, and the categories are neither exclusive or closed.’ Adjacent to modernist writing itself, productivity stirred within historical families.

This chapter explores poetic inscriptions on Mamluk metalwork, a subject that has received so far little attention. Published inscriptions have been mostly focused on the mainstream subject of patrons’ names and titles that characterise the epigraphy and aesthetics of Mamluk art. The only author to have dedicated substantial attention to this subject is the Italian Arabist Michelangelo Lanci (1779–1867). His Trattato, published in 1845–46, is a corpus of mainly Arabic inscriptions on various media, many of which are on Mamluk metalwork in Italian collections. Lanci did not shy away from tackling the arduous task of reading and translating poetic inscriptions. In spite of understandable inaccuracies in his interpretation, his corpus is a pioneer work that had been meanwhile forgotten, and a valuable source for this article. In recent time, besides Esin Atıl's catalogue Renaissance of Islam where she published a few poetic inscriptions on metal objects, only a few publications have dealt with this subject. This chapter presents a selection of poetic inscriptions on miscellaneous wares before focusing on a corpus of inscriptions dedicated to drinking bowls.

Princely metalwork of the early or Bahri Mamluk period, from the mid- seventh/thirteenth through the eighth/fourteenth century, continued and elaborated the Mosul and Ayyubid traditions, displaying a decorative programme of silver-inlaid decoration consisting of inscriptions alongside representations of courtly entertainments and abstract designs. Gradually, during the eighth/fourteenth century, the share of images diminished in favour of inscriptions designed to dominate the decorative programme in a style described as epigraphic and also as the official style. Among these luxury objects there is a small group inscribed with poetic texts instead of patrons’ names and titles.

During the decades roughly covering the first half of the ninth/ fifteenth century, the silver-inlaid production for princely patrons receded substantially. Following this hiatus a new production of less luxurious tinned engraved vessels, lunch-boxes, dishes, bowls and basins, emerged and continued to the end of the Mamluk period. Parallel to these functional wares, the last quarter of the century saw a revival of luxury vessels in novel styles and techniques. Although the metalwork of the ninth/fifteenth century continues to display princely names and titles, inscriptions no longer dominate the design but are rather integrated in the decorative programme as one element among others and their content is no longer confined to princely names and titles but often includes poetic texts at the same time.

In March 2020, as we temporarily closed our acting school due to the Coronavirus pandemic, we prepared ourselves to teach two full-time practical acting courses online. At the time, we had no idea that we would be forced to teach voice, movement, acting and so forth via Zoom for almost six months. For the past ten years as an acting coach, I have regularly used online video communication software, such as Skype, to help actors prepare for auditions in major film, theatre and television projects all over the world. I have even taught a full term of classes for a studio in Sydney, Australia, from my bed in Glasgow via Skype. I knew that the technology was not always reliable, but when called upon to use tools like Skype and Zoom to train our COVID-stranded students, and facing uncertainty, I remained hopeful.

Acting has always been an uncertain business. Every new project is different. When an actor receives a script, there is a new puzzle to solve, and for those without an established process to follow, uncertainty – and therefore self-doubt – is increased. I believe that when an actor prepares to tackle a new role, there are three essential questions that they ask themselves: ‘What should I do?’, Why should I do that?’ and ‘How should I do it?’. Actors should be able to rely upon an approach that pragmatically answers those questions and leads to confidence in their performance. The consistency and logic of Konstantin Stanislavski's system remain effective for this task nearly eighty-five years after his death.

Stanislavski is unquestionably the father of modern psychological acting. His work continues to influence actors, directors, writers and producers all over the world. I confess my own obsession with Stanislavski started aged fifteen, when I first read An Actor Prepares in the school library. His name is so synonymous with acting that once, during a routine stop by the police, an officer engaged me in a debate about the influence Stanislavski might have had on his favourite actor, Sean Connery. Stanislavski dedicated himself to continuous improvement in acting. He was an innovator who wasn't afraid to break with tradition, and the revolution in acting that he caused was due to his ceaseless desire to improve.

Adrian Curtin [AC]: What led you to adapt August Strindberg's play Miss Julie?

Kaite O’Reilly [KO’R]: I’d always found it interesting, but deeply problematic. It's misogynistic, it could be argued, of course. Strindberg was a product of his time, but there was something about the character dynamics that stayed in my head. I started imagining putting the play in that extraordinary period between the World Wars. And, as a disabled person and a proudly identifying ‘crip’, I thought it could be very interesting to explore disability as one of the last taboos. When it was written, the taboo might have been class, between the haughty Miss Julie and her underling. We know there have been other productions in the past that have touched on race etc., and I felt that one of the last taboos was around disability. Even now, in 2022, people seem to be surprised when disabled people are romantically involved with non-disabled people. And I wanted to explore that as a taboo.

I also wanted to set it in a period where it made sense to me. What if Julie's mother was actually a New Woman and had been involved with the Welsh suffrage movement? I was really interested in what they called ‘the surplus women’ at that time in history. If you’re a woman in 1919, you’ve been bred for a certain future. You were going to be a wife, a mother, a housekeeper, and that's right across all the classes. What happens if that is interrupted by one million men being slaughtered at the Somme? And I find the impact of ‘the surplus women’ fascinating. They became teachers. They became useful. And then the tension between the men coming back from fighting and women who had been showing their skills so strongly, keeping everything going during the First World War. First of all, the path that they were supposed to follow, for many of them, was now blocked off because their fiances or possible future mates were not available because of the terrible death in the trenches. But not only that: they’re now supposed to move aside and become invisible to let the men have the jobs back again.

Samuel Beckett (1906–89) remains a central figure in the complex of ideas called ‘modernism’, and his still-evolving legacy continues to inform ‘contemporary’ aesthetics. How might Beckett's specific relationships to different kinds of borders, and his concomitant status as a ‘border thinker’ avant la lettre, illuminate new terms of engagement with modernism's residual cultural energy? More than just providing a spatial or geographic reading of Beckett's literature or a biographical account of his quasi-exile, this chapter zeroes in on how modernist approaches to conceptual and actual boundaries – their establishment, negotiation and modes of transgression – continue to be salient today. It will use Beckett's own life and praxis, including the contemporary remediation and renegotiation of his works and their afterlife, as a throughline that reveals border thinking as a key modernist strategy. Examples drawn from contemporary experimental practice, in both academic/pedagogical and professional contexts, bear out the boundary-crossing nature of Beckett's achievement: as a novelist and playwright in both French and English, he leaves a legacy which increasingly crosses the global landscape without much regard for political borders. Instead, in geographic, linguistic and philosophical terms, Beckett's oeuvre discloses the persistent and the porous nature of the boundary itself.

‘Border thinking’ is a term that describes the state of epistemic resistance to binary options, borrowed from decolonial theories of sociology and politics (attributed most often to Gloria Anzaldua and Walter Mignolo, both writing at the turn of the current century). That this essay connects with a range of disciplines, sources and vocabularies from outside of Beckett studies will, it is hoped, structurally and formally help to drive home the point about the provisional nature of epistemic boundaries.

The term's conceptual origins can be traced to the Bandung Conference, a gathering of Asian and African states held in Indonesia in 1955, and the 1961 Belgrade Non-Aligned Conference. In both of these locations, dozens of nation-states gathered to reject the terms of the world's political choice of either communism aligned with the Soviet Union, or capitalism aligned with the United States. These groups of nations chose to de-link from both, to sidestep the terms in which the question was asked (as opposed to answering), and to dedicate themselves to the embodiment and enactment of decolonisation.

Introduction

The initial and visceral response to an act of suicide terrorism is often one of utter disbelief. How can it be that someone felt this horrific action was the most logical step to take? Surely there were other options than blowing oneself up and killing numerous others in the process. This incredulity causes one to attribute some kind of psychological disorder to the terrorist – no sane, or mentally healthy, person could commit such acts. In an earlier work, I noted a similar underlying impulse in much Western writing aimed at discounting the validity of the suicide terrorist's agenda (Gauthier 2015). This propensity reveals a reluctance to accept that terrorists may act while in full control of their faculties or that they have been driven by motivations whose foundations bear similarity to one's own (revenge, renown, meaningfulness, altruism). In fact, many critics and theorists posit suicide terrorists as rational agents performing what they believe are positive actions for the good of their community. In other words, gestures typically conceived of as acts of aggression should also be reframed as evidence of the individual's generosity, selflessness and sacrifice for the welfare of their community. Robert Pape, for instance, observes, ‘the homicidal dimension of the act should not cause us to overlook an important cause leading to it – that many suicide terrorists are killing themselves to advance what they see as the common good’ (180). In this iteration, suicide terrorists are no longer simply intent on the slaughter of innocent civilians, but young people who, misguided or not, sacrifice their lives in the hopes of bringing some measure of relief to their oppressed communities.

But instead of recognising the altruistic motivations of the perpetrator, the observer feels the need to dissociate from, and condemn, the actions of the other. Few wish to risk being perceived as condoning, or worse supporting, murderous behaviour. In other words, not empathising with the terrorist becomes an act of (psychological) self-preservation. For these reasons, the ‘condemnation imperative’, as Ghassan Hage (2003) calls it, is present in much of the intellectual discourse pertaining to such actions.

The Wadi al-Khirqa graffiti site lies in the Óisma plateau in the northern Hijaz, which has been known as maktabat al-'Arab (‘library of the Arabs’) due to its numerous works of rock art and inscriptions left by human beings throughout history. Many early Islamic graffiti of the plateau have been found along the pilgrim route connecting Syria and the two holy cities in the Hijaz; however, their existence is not only confined to the areas along major pilgrim routes but also sometimes found in places far removed from them. One such graffiti site, Wadi al-Khirqa, is situated about 75 km northwest of Tabuk [Figure 18.1], which is far from any major route throughout history. The nearest route from this point was the ancient caravan route called Darb al-Bakra, but it runs some 10 km east of it.

In March 2017 a survey of the Wadi al-Khirqa graffiti was realised as a part of the Saudi–Japanese al-Jawf/Tabk Archaeological Project, a joint mission of Kanazawa University (Japan) and the Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage. Our team registered 105 early Islamic Arabic and 33 Ancient North Arabian graffiti.

Wadi al-Khirqa is a small wādī running from south to north. The graffiti site is divided into three groups, which are on the sandstone rock on its east bank [Figure 18.2]. Group I consists of a concentration of early Islamic graffiti [Figure 18.3]. Ninety Islamic graffiti are inscribed on a gentle slope. Group II, situated about 130 m south of Group I, is that of Ancient North Arabian graffiti, but contains thirteen early Islamic graffiti. Group III, located between Group I and Group II, contains only two early Islamic graffiti.

The early Islamic graffiti of Wadi al-Khirqa, as a whole, present the textual and palaeographical features of the first two centuries after the hijra (beginning of the seventh century to the beginning of the ninth century). None of the graffiti includes dates or nisba (affiliation) in personal names, but some include long genealogies, which enabled me to classify twenty-eight graffiti into four generations extending over two family trees: the Hurmuz family (sixteen graffiti) and the ‘Abd al-Wahhāb family (twelve graffiti). These classifications show that the Islamic graffiti of Wadi al-Khirqa were left by local people over generations, which means that the linguistic background of the inscribers is relatively homogenous.

It was a genuine honour to be invited to give a keynote lecture at ‘The Figure of the Terrorist in Literature, Film and Media’, the November 2019 conference in Zurich out of which this wonderful volume has arisen. It is an even greater privilege to be asked to write the afterword to this exceptionally interesting and insightful collection of papers, especially as I feel that I am the least qualified in the subject of all the contributors and there are many other more eminent scholars who could have been given the task instead. Unlike all the contributors to this superb collection, I have no legitimate expertise in literary studies or media studies. I trained in political science and international relations, and only came to the subject of terrorism in literature by happenstance.

In the following pages, I want to reflect briefly on some of the insights I have gained from this truly interesting, thoughtful and engaging collection of papers, in part through the prism of how and why I came to be interested in the figure of the terrorist, and how my concerns have changed since the terrorist attack on my home city of Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019. I commend this volume as a highly stimulating, rigorous and genuinely insightful addition to the growing literature on representations of terrorism in literature and visual media, and a major contribution to our understanding of the subject.

The Figure of the Terrorist

One day, somewhere around 2008, I was searching for a novel or film about terrorism which I could recommend to my students as a way of supplementing the academic books and articles I was making them read as part of a course. As a teacher, I had discovered that a good novel or movie could sometimes engage students and bring topics to life in ways that generally turgid, scientific academic writing could not. In this instance, however, when I thought about the many terrorism-related novels I had read, I realised that I could not think of a single example which I felt represented terrorism or terrorists in a realistic or credible way. That is, I could not recall any novel that told a story in which the terrorist protagonist had a believable psychology, motivation, history or characteristics, or any genuinely understandable reasons for what they did (Jackson 2015a; Jackson 2018).

As a creative practitioner, actor, singer and theatre-maker, my recent focus has been on new small-scale touring theatre productions which tell the life stories of two twentieth-century women: the composer and writer Ethel Smyth, and the writer Virginia Woolf. Both of these women were writing and creating their work within the modernist period and used innovative narrative forms. They introduced experimental ideas and techniques in their work with the stream of consciousness as a narrative device.

Ethel Smyth: Grasp the Nettle and Virginia Woolf: Killing the Angel were written for a single female performer with a pianist on stage, not a dramatic but a ‘neutral’ presence, as if in the orchestra pit. The scripts are compiled by editing text taken from the published autobiographical books, essays, letters and diaries written by these women into a dramatic structure. Solely drawing from their words provides an authenticity to the text, placing each character in her time, weighted with her phrasing, nuance and humour. These one-woman plays rely on the ‘drama’ to be built by the character's journey, her preoccupation with her internal reality and her response to other characters and events. At all times, the performer is aware of and talking to the audience; there is no conventional ‘fourth wall’. The audience is required to leap in time and place with the character on her journey with minimal help from the set or props.

These scripts are mostly drawn from Ethel Smyth's eight published autobiographical books, letters and newspaper articles and Virginia Woolf's memoirs, autobiographical and polemic essays, letters and diaries. Both women experimented in life-writing and narrative form. The text is delivered as a stream of consciousness; the character is her own storyteller. An intimacy develops between her and the audience, drawing them in as her confidants, privy to private thoughts and desires, and enabling an audience to suspend its disbelief; the actor ‘is’ the historical woman in question. Janet Gibson, convenor of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Opera, remarked of the performance: ‘I am left with the distinct impression that I was in the presence of Smyth herself.’

Introduction

On 13 November 2015, France's capital experienced the deadliest terrorist attack to occur on French soil since the Second World War. The multi-site attack took place at the Stade de France, the Bataclan theatre, and various cafés across the city, resulting in the deaths of 130 people. Of the 151 terrorism-related fatalities in Europe that year, 148 took place in France (Europol 2016, 10). The context surrounding the attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo earlier that same year famously ignited widespread public debate surrounding the limits of free speech and the extent of Islamophobia in France, a discussion which has since been explored in a wide range of scholarship and public discourse (Todd 2015; Plenel 2016; Wolfreys 2017). While the debate over Islamophobia in France continued, the increase in right-wing extremist terrorism was overshadowed. According to Europol, in 2014 France reported no right-wing terrorist attacks, compared to seven recorded in 2015, with a sharp increase in anti-Muslim violence in the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks (2016, 41). Although these attacks were reported in French news media, they were often classified as actes anti-musulmans (anti-Muslim acts) by sources across the political spectrum (Beunaiche 2015; France 24 2015; Le service Metronews 2015; Les Echos 2015), downplaying their violent nature. With these events reported as terrorism by French authorities and recognised as such by Europol, but downplayed by French media simply as anti-Muslim ‘acts’ rather than ‘attacks’ or ‘violence’, a distinct tendency to euphemise far-right terrorism reveals itself.

These events have made terrorism a pertinent topic in France, and their portrayal on screen is now emerging as a burgeoning area of interest within French cinema. This chapter will argue that the tendency within French news media to euphemise far-right violence is carried over to contemporary mainstream French cinema. However, as this chapter aims to show, the favourable portrayal of white terrorists is not confined to those motivated by far-right extremism and extends also to white and white-presenting Jihadist extremists; in these portrayals of terrorism, racial bias can be seen despite the ideology of the terrorist figure. To demonstrate how white terrorists are depicted in less demonising ways, this chapter will consider two recent French-language representations of terrorist figures.